


The Safe Side of Things

by Aliana



Series: Do No Harm [1]
Category: Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, Gondor, Houses of Healing, Minas Tirith, Third Age
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-18
Updated: 2012-03-18
Packaged: 2017-11-02 02:56:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/364233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aliana/pseuds/Aliana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A young Gondorian begins his surgery apprenticeship at the Houses of Healing. Much awkwardness ensues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Safe Side of Things

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to LiveJournal in spring 2005. A prequel to [Fallen](http://archiveofourown.org/works/364151/chapters/591380).

"You are my first apprentice," he said. "I was not expecting to have one until I was at least forty."

I was not sure what I should say to that, so I apologized, which is what I usually do when I am not sure what I should say.

"Don't be sorry," he said. "I'm glad you are here."

He was looking at me oddly, which people often do after I apologize. But the way I see it, it's a small price to pay for being on the safe side of things.

*

"Here is the surgery," he said. The room was square and small. "The most important thing is to keep everything very clean."

"Show me your hands," he said after a moment. I had been looking at the knives that were laid out on the table. I thought they looked a bit like the silvery fish I once saw in the river on an outing with my father—which makes little sense now when I look back on it, because knives are knives, hard and dead as anything.

"Your fingernails are short," he said. "That's good. It's important to keep them trimmed like that."

I told him that I bit them down.

He considered that for a moment, arms crossed against the grey cloth of his jacket. 

"Well," he said. "You'll not do that anymore. You'll trim them."

"Sorry, sir." I was looking at the knives again. They were all very sharp, and some of them were very large. 

"Laeron?"

"Yes, sir?"

"If in the future you ever have need to apologize to me, rest assured that I will tell you."

"Sor—yes, sir." 

When I turned around, Valacar was smiling.

*

Outside of giving me instructions, he was very quiet. This made me want to talk more, so at first I said things that didn't matter. I said things about the weather. I talked about what I had overheard the soldiers saying outside, though those things seemed to matter more and more as time went on. He would nod and listen with his head tilted to one side and sometimes he would ask me to go on, or about what I thought. Eventually, though, the conversation dragged off and we were back to where we started. But after a while it wasn't so bad.

I should probably tell you right now that I fidget terribly. I bounce my foot or twitch my leg when I am not doing anything else. Sometimes I rub my hands together or snap my fingers softly. I suppose it calms me down, though I scarcely know I'm doing it—someone else has to point it out to me. It near drives my father mad. 

"You stop that foolishness right now," he says whenever I start up.

My mother says she finds it endearing. But then my mother finds most things endearing.

I thought that Valacar might be especially concerned about the fidgeting, as he was the one who would have to teach me all the incisions and the stitches and everything, and the fidgets might make it a good sight more difficult. But not a word. Sometimes I would bump into tables and chairs in the surgery, knocking them a little bit crooked; he would move in silently after me and straighten them again.

*

The other boys all said that Valacar was one of the best surgeons in the Houses, and not even terribly old, either, and that that really said something. They said I was lucky to be his apprentice. 

All of this should have made me happy, I suppose, but really it just made my nerves even worse. If Valacar really was one of the best surgeons in the Houses, then I was sure he would be all the more disappointed to have an apprentice that was no good at all. I did not think a young skinny fellow who still bit his nails would make a particularly good surgeon.

Still, I had made it through my primary training without being thrown bodily out of the Houses and onto the flagstones of the Sixth Circle. So perhaps there was hope.

On my third day with him, one of the little girls brought some clean towels to the surgery. After I had thanked her, she went away mumbling under her breath, tripping over the occasional word.

"Induction time's getting close, I guess," I said, setting the towels down on one of the chairs.

Valacar picked them up again.

"Aye," he agreed. "All the young ones are fretting over their Canon-recitations, I suppose. They ought to be learning something more useful."

"Aye, sir." I cleared my throat and remembered. "It was…well, it was a bit of an ordeal for me. Terrible time memorizing, and all."

He made what might have been a sympathetic noise and then went about carefully repositioning the towels on one of the tables.

"I can't even remember the beginning anymore," he remarked.

"That was…" I closed my eyes and tried to see if I could remember. "That was the part where you're supposed to make a vow to the Valar, to be pure and devoted and the like. And that was rather short, and then there was the bit about the teachers and apprentices, and then…"

He snorted. "That was the worst part of it all."

"Sir?" I opened my eyes.

"To aid him who has taught me this art if ever he should be in need, and to hold him as equal to my parents…" he recited, then trailed off. "I remember that, now. A lad has a rough time of it with just one father to begin with. The last thing he needs is another one."

I didn't know what to say to that, and I couldn't apologize. So I looked at my feet for a moment. When I looked back up at Valacar, he was staring at me and he had his arms folded over his chest as if he were thinking about something.

"Well, I suppose I could make an attempt. If you really wanted, that is."

I told him no, that was really all right and he needn't trouble himself on my account.

"Well." He made another noise. "There's a good lad, indeed."

I didn't say anything else for a while after that.

*

He was very particular about certain things: where the towels and the water-basin should go, the order in which the knives should be set out, the way the small table should align against the large one. It did not seem to bother him especially when I set something awry (which I usually did, no matter how I tried, for he seemed to have some secret system in his head), but he would always step in and fix it without speaking to me.

I watched him, and after some time I thought that perhaps his straightening was like my fidgeting, somehow. And that made me feel better.

*

Right away that first week, there was a man who needed his right leg taken off above the knee. Valacar told me that I should sit in and maybe hold the clamps if he needed someone to do that. I was pretty well used to blood by that time, but I had never watched an entire surgery from beginning to end. Valacar spoke to me as he worked, explaining this and that as he went along. I kept looking back and forth from the man's face to the mess that was his right leg, but I could not make myself believe they were part of the same person.

At supper I did not feel like speaking at all. I pushed my food about on my plate and then suddenly all I could see was blood and flecks of white bone, and I got up from the table and went outside to be sick.

Valacar came out about a minute later. I was sitting on the ground, against the wall that faced the northeast gardens. I stared at my feet because I did not want to look at him. He was holding a glass, and he handed it to me and I mumbled a thank you, sir.

"I'll ask Cook to set something aside for you if you are hungry later," he said as I took a sip of water.

"I can't do this," I said.

He looked at me for a moment and then he got down next to me on the ground. He was thin, and therefore good at folding himself up on short notice. Though he did not seem to be exactly the sitting-on-the-ground sort.

"The first weeks are difficult," he said. "You'll be all right."

I shook my head. I was still looking at my feet.

"My mother…" I began. "My mother, she…wanted me to be apprenticed to the Houses so that I would not have to go to war—at least, no one ever said as much to me, not to my face, but that's what I can gather. My cousins are officers. So, I don't know—maybe my mother knew something about—I don't know. That I wouldn't be good for the army. I was never very brave." I smiled. "I can't even make myself go up to girls and talk to them. So I suspect I'll not be any good for surgery, either." 

Valacar didn't say anything, just looked at me for a while. My face felt warm, and I wished I had not told him so much.

"Well," he said after a minute or two. "I don't care how or why you have come here, but I am glad to have you. And you'll not need to brave always. Just for a little bit every day, and then after a while it won't feel like you have to be brave at all."

"Sir?"

"The most important thing is just that you keep everything very clean."

"You're not just saying that, sir?"

"I never just say things, Laeron." And then I must have had an apologetic look on my face, because he smiled and held up his hand.

He unfolded himself and stood up: "And girls can be a difficult lot, as well. I suppose that most of the ones I have known enjoy getting compliments. If that helps…" He paused and looked at me. "At all."

I nodded a little.

"You'll come back inside when you're ready," he said, and then he walked away.

I stayed out by the gardens for a while after that, just studying the trees or staring into the bottom of my glass.

*

The year I became a surgeon's apprentice in the Houses of Healing was also the year I stopped biting my fingernails. And never once did Valacar tell me I needed to apologize for anything. So I must have been doing something all right.


End file.
